"Amazon Is Ripe For Disruption"Uma palavra que se tem mantido perto de mim por estes dias: descontinuidade.
""Tinha que ser possível uma trajectória que nos aproximasse da Europa", afirma Maria de Lurdes Rodrigues que prevê que 2013 trará "tempos difíceis""Se calhar, só agora, com uma economia a exportar mais do que importa, com uma economia a poupar mais do que gasta, é que nos estamos a aproximar da Europa.
"Muitas vezes, para se fazer uma reforma estrutural que vai levar a diminuição do défice é preciso fazer um investimento inicial."O que estamos a fazer é uma reforma estrutural e, o investimento inicial está a ser feito, nos subsídios de desemprego e apoios sociais que tentam minimizar o impacte do choque da mudança. Numa mudança estrutural como a que vivemos não existe mapa, não existem "doutores", nem gurus capazes de indicarem onde se deve apostar, onde se deve criar empresas. Há demasiada incerteza, é uma autêntica Terra Incógnita, por isso, tem de se tactear, tem de se experimentar, tem de se arriscar, com pouca ou nenhuma informação. Meter o Estado a fazer investimentos iniciais é o contrário do que se deve fazer, o Estado aposta sempre em grande, e isso é demasiado perigoso neste ambiente de incerteza e de descoberta.
"Tendo em conta o OE 2013 adivinha que vamos ter um ano complicado?O que vale é que o país não é o mundozinho dependente do OE como o ecossistema "lesboeta" crê, pelo contrário. Neste mundo de incerteza, arrisco aqui prever que 2013 não vai ser tão mau quanto o pintamos.
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Adivinho tempos muito difíceis. Acho que o pior ainda está para vir. Aumento de desemprego, baixa do rendimento das famílias e mais empresas a falir. Ficaremos mais pobres, de todos os ponto de vista. Pobres nas infra-estruturas que criámos. Não teremos jornais, não teremos televisões e não teremos restaurantes. (Moi ici: As prioridades da senhora) Vamos perder uma série de instituições que demoraram anos a criar. Tinha que ser possível, com uma mobilização diferente, (Moi ici: Qual, a da "Festa"? Podia concretizar?) fazer o que é preciso (Moi ici: Podia concretizar? Qual é a receita que tem e que todos devíamos pagar? ) e continuar numa trajectória que nos aproximasse da Europa e não o contrário.(Moi ici: A "Festa" punha-nos na trajectória?) "
"A BILLION dollars is a lot of hay for knicknacks. But craftsmen and vintage collectors on Etsy, a dedicated online marketplace, are on course to sell wares worth that much in 2012. That is nearly double the tally for 2011 and three times as much as in 2010. Etsy's gross merchandise sales exceeded $800m by the end of November, its first $100m month. December, with its Christmas shopping, is likely to be better yet. Etsy charges $0.20 per listing, of which there were 17m in November, and takes a 3.5% cut of the sales price.Como referem os autores em "Custom Nation" o acrónimo CIY (create it yourself) é mais apropriado que DIY (do it yourself).
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To be fair, Etsy sells plenty of useful things besides bric-a-brac. But all products listed on the site must fit into one of three categories: handmade, vintage (defined as at least 20 years old) or raw supplies (like beads or ribbon and trim)."
"Three decades ago home schooling was illegal in 30 states. It was considered a fringe phenomenon, pursued by cranks, and parents who tried it were often persecuted and sometimes jailed. Today it is legal everywhere, and is probably the fastest-growing form of education in America."
"Clientes do Private Banking do BCP viram todas as economias desaparecer. Julgando que estavam a investir em produtos seguros, apostavam afinal, a conselho do banco, em activos tóxicos."Recordar este artigo histórico "The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" de George A. Akerlof e publicado no The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 84, Issue 3 (Aug., 1970), 488-500.
"When Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jim Clark started Shutterfly in December 1999, his idea was to give American consumers the ability to print photographs from their digital cameras. Back then only a tiny number of Americans had digital cameras. With a simple two-megapixel camera costing as much as $800, its not hard to see why. But Jim was convinced that the world would switch to digital: in retrospect, his prediction couldn't have been more prescient.Ainda ontem, num jantar de Natal alguém comentava exemplos do mercado em que actuava, uns afundam-se e outros crescem e crescem e crescem. Voltando ao modelo de Ian McCarthy:
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Around 2004, when it became clear to everyone (and not just Jim) that Americans were, in fact, swapping film for digital, hundreds of companies rushed into the digital photo printing space.
At the time, Shutterfly was far from a household name. The company had just $50 million in annual revenue in 2004 and was barely turning a profit. Meanwhile, Kodak—the age-old king of American photography—had, by 2005, surged to the No. 1 spot in U.S. digital camera sales and was pulling in $5.7 billion annually. Back then, if you had to bet on which company would be filing for bankruptcy protection in 2012, the smart bet would have been Shutterfly by a mile. But, of course, history tells a different story.
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Although Kodak had embraced digital cameras, the company failed to see what people would want to use them for. Kodak kept thinking consumers would still want standard 4 x 6 photographs. In 2005 Shutterfly hired eBay's customer acquisition guru. Jeffrey Housenbold, to take over as its new CEO. Jeff had a different idea, which he told me when I spoke to him in the spring of 2012:
When I walked in [as CEO of Shutterfly], we were largely undifferentiated from the competition. It was all about 4 x 6 prints and price. We were not helping people do more with their images and memories. We were much more along the old paradigm, which was: Drop off a roll of film, develop prints and place them in clear sleeves for users to put in a binder on a bookshelf. I brought a different perspective and said, "My wife and I use Shutterfly to stay connected in this dual-income, geographically fragmented, time-compressed society where we have friends and family all over the world." I thought of it as a social connection and a way to share life's memories with friends and family.
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Shutterfly dropped the "photo printers" tagline and started calling itself an "Internet-based social expression and personal publishing service." And while Kodak remained focused on the old 4 x 6 photo for the bookshelf binder, Shutterfly turned its eye to more customized and lucrative products like custom calendars, custom greeting cards, custom photo books, custom mugs and custom mouse pads. The company also started putting an enormous value on gaining the trust and loyalty of their customers. Unlike many of its competitors, Shutterfly never deleted a single photo its users uploaded, regardless of whether that customer bought anything. As Jeff said, We have always had this customer-centric approach, where it is not about photos and it is not about this month's revenue. It is about a lifelong relationship."
Jeff's vision paid off. In January 2011 Shutterfly became one of the world's first true customizers to break the $1 billion mark for a public company valuation. Soon after, in January 2012, the less customizing Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection: two months later, the once-iconic photo company sold its online arm, the Kodak Gallery (complete with 75 million users), to Shutterfly for $23.8 million."
"Ministros da Saúde e da Economia planeiam internacionalização do SNS e da prestação privada em áreas como transplantação, reprodução ou termalismo. Norte da Europa. PALOP e Estados Unidos são potenciais clientesPessoalmente, nos últimos meses, tenho tido conhecimento indirecto de vários casos em que pessoas dos PALOP têm recorrido à saúde pública em Portugal.
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O plano é vender desde assistência médica muito especializada a cuidados de bem-estar, em pacotes com viagem e hotel incluídos. Na Europa. na diáspora e nos EUA. A 'carteira de serviços' já está a ser trabalhada por um grupo multissectorial - formalmente constituído no início do mês - e deverá ser apresentada logo nos primeiros meses de 2013."
"a desire of many people to shop differently — in pleasant family-friendly contexts that enable low-key, face-to-face interactions with merchants. A parallel trend is the rise of the food truck movement. In research we conducted earlier this year on the future of commerce, we found that people gravitate towards these kinds of "pop-up" vendor experiences because of the more personal qualities they provide — getting to know the vendor, suggestions for making the most of a purchase, or even just a certain quirkiness. In other words, these are fundamentally more human retail experiences."Uma espécie de polarização do mercado: o online sem interacção humana e o retalho físico mas com uma aposta na experiência. Não creio que o futuro do retalho físico passe por isto:
"Para o responsável, “os salários baixos são uma inevitabilidade”, afiançando que o problema é dos portugueses porque ainda não se convenceram que este é o País que temos e que têm de trabalhar com os salários que há”."Não tenho a veleidade de obrigar quem quer que seja a seguir um caminho alternativo, acredito sim, que as lojas não vão conseguir sobreviver no embate com o online se forem para uma guerra frontal com as mesmas armas.
"As we, get deeper into the 2010s, the most successful companies in every industry in the United States - from food to fashion - are ditching mass production in favor of customization. This shift is so enormous and all-encompassing that it ultimately promises to define the coming decades as powerfully as the Industrial Revolution defined the 19th and 20th centuries. It is 2012, and we are at the beginning of the 21st century's Custom Revolution.Esta "Custom Nation" não é mais do que uma designação alternativa para o que apelido aqui de Mongo.
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America is becoming a nation of customizers. And the one new rule for successful businesses across the country is simple: Customize for your clients. ... Customization is completely changing the way we do business,
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In the 20th century, conventional wisdom was that customization was a bad business model for anything, except a small niche seller because it was expensive and slow. But that was so last century. Today, forget everything you thought you knew about customizing.
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Companies with completely custom business models are popping up everywhere and breaking \that used to be thought of as a glass ceiling for customizers: the billion-dollar mark.
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For would-be entrepreneurs, the custom business model is the new gold rush.
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"Customization isn't just a trend," I said. "It's the new way Americans are going to do business. It's the new mass production. By the year 2040, everything we consume - food, clothing, cars, advertisements, trips abroad - will be customized to meet our exact desires. Everything. I'm willing to put money on it."
"Strategy works because people want to align their decisions with others when uncertainty is large.
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An uninformed strategy promotes an internal alignment at the cost of a considerable loss of external alignment
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Without any strategy, the organization does relatively well on external alignment, but no better than random on internal alignment. With the optimal strategy bet, things switch to the other extreme: the organization does well on internal alignment, but no better than random or external alignment.
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Uncertainty drives the need for strategy: (Moi ici: E o que é que tem crescido os últimos tempos?) absent uncertainty, everyone knows the optimal decisions so that there seems to be no role for strategy.
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Uncertainty makes it hard to choose the right decision, but because uncertainty makes it hard to anticipate others and thus to align with their actions.
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Uncertainty makes strategy valuable, but only when combined with a high level of interaction, which shows that the relevant effect of initial/public uncertainty is not to make it hard to find the correct decision but to make it hard to predict what others will do and thus to coordinate with them
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The role of strategy is then to create common knowledge of the optimal action, which then becomes a focal point for more responsive coordination.
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Strategy can help to create change by creating common knowledge of an alternative optimum."
"1. Depend on no one.
Success will elude you until you realize that no one is the cause of your problems and no one can ensure you will achieve your goals. Your destiny is up to you and no one else.
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2. Assume the economy will not improve.
Be on full alert DEFCON 3 and do not take anything, especially the security of your job, for granted. You need to make yourself so valuable to your employer that there is no way the company could consider firing you. The new economy demands a shift to an entrepreneurial mindset that goes beyond the scope of work in your job description.
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4. Be bright.
The future is brilliant for those who are positive. Be the most optimistic person in the game, and that will separate you from others more than anything else."
"Let's say you create tiers of functionality. The "good" offering might include basic functionality of the product through a software solution; "better" might contain the software solution, plus an online option; "best" might be a customized SaaS solution that integrates with your back-end CRM.
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Now when Procurement says, "You've got to sharpen your pencil and drop your price by 30%," your answer can be, "No problem. We can certainly drop the price by 30%, but we're going to have to take the customized SaaS solution out of the bundle to meet that price."
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If Procurement agrees to your proposition, you'll know the extra wasn't really needed in the first place. So be it. You've reduced your company's cost-to-serve."
"In fact, their organization is producing precisely the results it is designed to produce.Como costumo dizer: Não há acasos!!!
So is yours.
So is your community, your family, your government, your country.
Because . . . the design determines the results.
So snap out of it!
Stop fighting the existing reality.
Stop trying to change the people.
If you don't like the results, change the design."
"The sad reality is that the people do pay attention to economists and their models. Although it’s true that the tools used by economists to analyze business firms are too abstract and speculative to offer any useful guidance to entrepreneurs and managers, this doesn’t prevent them being used, with devastating negative effect in the real world."Depois, Steve Denning pega na argumentação de Krugman e desmonta-a com números.
"Ironically, the deeper cause of these problems may lie with the economic work of Coase himself, whose writings form the basis of the current economic theory of the firm. Firms exist, Coase wrote, because they reduce transaction costs. This theory won Coase the Nobel Prize in economics. It has contributed to the continuing focus in business on cost-cutting and efficiency, while short-changing the ever more pressing need today to add value for customers. Far from being irrelevant to business, as Coase argues in HBR, economic theories play a key role in creating the intellectual foundation for it.
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What we need now is a new economic theory of the firm that includes an appropriate emphasis on adding value for customers, not just on efficiency and cutting costs. If Professor Krugman were to turn his attention to that, with some serious economic analysis, instead of merely berating corporations as “bandits”, he could well deserve a second Nobel Prize."
"In 1997, the UK Confederation of British Industry (CBI) produced a report titled Fit for the Future (Confederation of British Industry, 1997). This report was targeted at UK manufacturing and it claimed that an additional £60 billion a year could be added to the UK gross domestic product if manufacturing performance was raised to US manufacturing performance levels. The report stressed the need for UK improvement programmes based on cost-cutting, efficiency gains and better product lead-times and quality. As a consequence of the popularity of this report, the concept of being "fit" was synonymous with being world-class."E a minha mente começou logo a divagar...
"even a strategy “bet” - when the strategist chooses a direction despite not knowing the optimal decisions – can create value by generating a focal point, which improves alignment, though on a potential suboptimal course of action. (Moi ici: Um ponto a merecer reflexão... o poder do alinhamento interno. Como diria Weick, "any map will do")
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The value of a strategy increases when there is more initial or public uncertainty, with uncertainty being a complement to the degree of interaction. (Moi ici: E como são os tempos que vivemos? Vivemos em tempos de mais ou menos incerteza?)
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Uncertainty makes it difficult to predict what others will do and thus to align with their actions.
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Choices and decisions (that make up the strategy) “guide” (towards an objective) is obviously implicit in the idea of “strategy as plan”.
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The value of developing a strategy is higher when there are stronger interactions among the decisions, when eventual confidence about the interactions is higher, and when decisions are more difficult to reverse.
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Absent interactions there is no gain from aligning decisions and thus no gain from an overall “strategy” to guide decisions. A business that is all about getting a few decisions correct, with no interactions, gains little from strategy. This ties back to the idea that the key role of strategy is to generate consistency across decisions, both over time and across functions, and confirms the central role of interactions in strategy as suggested by the management literature.
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Strategy – its key role is always to generate a pattern. Strategy only matters when there should be a pattern in the decisions and strategy makes sure that that pattern is realized.
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The value of strategy increases when there is a proportional increase in the importance of all interactions, the value of strategy does not increase with the importance of one individual decision by itself."
"Segundo as contas feitas pelo Instituto dos Vinhos do Douro e do Porto (IVDP), com base no total anual móvel (últimos 12 meses) em Novembro, foram comercializadas para o exterior quase oito milhões de caixas de vinho do Porto (equivalente a 95,9 milhões de garrafas). A subida de 0,9% do preço médio fez o volume de negócios subir para 308,7 milhões de euros, mais 1% do que no período homólogo (305,6 milhões de euros).Pensando à francesa e apostando no mercado do luxo, há um mundo de oportunidades por co-criar.
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Realçando o crescimento do preço médio, o presidente do IVDP, Manuel de Novaes Cabral, considerou "muito positivo" o nível de vendas dos vinhos da Região Demarcada do Douro, frisando em comunicado que isto aconteceu "num ano em que se acentuou o cenário negativo em termos económicos", incluindo em alguns dos "principais mercados" de destino destes produtos, na Europa."
